books.google.com - The opening verse of this latest father/son collaboration probes the very essence of a form--and a feeling; it asks the question that anyone who has sought solace in music can relate to. The pair's first composition wandered through a Harlem collage, depicting "a call, a song, the mood indigo, a language...https://books.google.com/books/about/Blues_Journey.html?id=uFbhAAAAMAAJ&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareBlues Journey

Blues Journey

The opening verse of this latest father/son collaboration probes the very essence of a form--and a feeling; it asks the question that anyone who has sought solace in music can relate to. The pair's first composition wandered through a Harlem collage, depicting "a call, a song, the mood indigo, a language of darkness." This new duet is the blues: verbally and visually, it explores the idiom while exemplifying it. A call and response accompanies each painting. As the journey progresses, the lyrics and art look at loss through the lenses of slavery, poverty, lynching, love spurned, fear of dying and of living. An author's note provides a lucid description of the history, elements, and importance of the blues.

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LibraryThing Review

User Review - jenniferflowers - LibraryThing

The cover artwork gives the feeling of a “blues journey”. The cover is primarily two shades of blue, the sky and the grass. There is a brown dirt path with a wagon carrying three African Americans ...Read full review

LibraryThing Review

User Review - ocosta1 - LibraryThing

I liked this book for it's writing and illustrations. I liked how the author repeated certain lines in his poem. For example, one stanza is "Blues, won't you free me,/let all this suffering cease ...Read full review

About the author (2003)

Walter Dean Myers was born on August 12, 1937 in Martinsberg, West Virginia. When he was three years old, his mother died and his father sent him to live with Herbert and Florence Dean in Harlem, New York. He began writing stories while in his teens. He dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Army at the age of 17. After completing his army service, he took a construction job and continued to write. He entered and won a 1969 contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children, which led to the publication of his first book, Where Does the Day Go? During his lifetime, he wrote more than 100 fiction and nonfiction books for children and young adults. His works include Fallen Angels, Bad Boy, Darius and Twig, Scorpions, Lockdown, Sunrise Over Fallujah, Invasion, Juba!, and On a Clear Day. He also collaborated with his son Christopher, an artist, on a number of picture books for young readers including We Are America: A Tribute from the Heart and Harlem, which received a Caldecott Honor Award, as well as the teen novel Autobiography of My Dead Brother. He was the winner of the first-ever Michael L. Printz Award for Monster, the first recipient of the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, and a recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults. He also won the Coretta Scott King Award for African American authors five times. He died on July 1, 2014, following a brief illness, at the age of 76.

Christopher Myers is a writer and fine artist, but he is best known for his award-winning picture books, such as the Caldecott and Coretta Scott King honor book Harlem, written by his father, and his own Black Cat, which also received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.